Due to XDC, we'll come for a visit to Miami in early May. As usual I like to meet other developers beside the visited conference and like to organize a meeting for local FileMaker developers.
FileMaker developers are invited to join the local FileMaker meet-up group.
The dinner meeting is 30th April 2019 at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant in Miami.
If you are interested in private time for consulting, training or discussion MBS or FileMaker topics, we can of course schedule a meeting. Please contact me directly if you are interested.
If you plan to sign up and get the early bird price for your ticket, please sign up today.
Monkeybread Software is pleased to announce the European MBS Xojo Conference in metropolitan Cologne, Germany. We meet in the lovely Dorint Hotel in the center of Cologne. The hotel is in the city center and in walking distance to the main station. Beside our two conference days we have accompanying social programme with our dinner event and optional two training days. For the evenings we have casual get-together in the hotel bar or beer garden.
We already have 40 people coming from 10 different countries!
🇩🇪, 🇬🇧, 🇳🇱, 🇫🇷, 🇸🇪, 🇨🇭, 🇺🇸, 🇬🇷, 🇸🇮 & 🇦🇹.
The schedule:
Oct 23rd: Xojo Training in English
Oct 24th: Conference, first day with dinner event
Oct 25th: Conference, second day
Oct 26th: Xojo Training in German
Registration is open. The early bird offer available till 24th April is just 499 Euro plus VAT. Attending the conference costs regularly 699 Euro plus VAT, including food and beverage in the Dorint Hotel as well as an accompanying social program.
Sessions are to be held in English. Our conference is conceived as a networking event for the Xojo community. The conference is an ideal opportunity for sharing your thoughts and your own development experience with fellow users and developers. If you like to hold a presentation, please contact us as soon as possible. Speaker receive discounted tickets.
Zahlreiche FileMaker Vorträge am Abend rund um FileMaker, Empfang und einem unterhaltsames Special am Ende.
Bitte den Termin vormerken und frei halten.
These days I do last final changes for my MBS session slides. Got a nice review of the past year since last XDC to show what's new in the plugins.
For people interested in PDF, we include a slide about the upcoming DynaPDF 5.0 release later this year and something new we are working on the plugin part for DynaPDF. So if you are interested in PDF, I hope you join the session. Unless schedule changes, the MBS session should be 2nd May @ 13 o'clock.
We are looking forward to see you all in Miami!
PS: Early bird offers for the European Xojo Developer Conference ends this week. Join us in Cologne from 23rd to 26th October 2019 for conference and training days.
While we interact a lot with each other in your development community via forum, social media and tons of emails, we should not forget the importance of being in a live face-to-face setting with others. Being active in the developer community can bring many benefits. There is power in being connected to other developers who are active in the same area. It can be easy to skip meetings and not come to the annual conferences, but soon you may have skipped them for several years. Joining the forums is not enough, you need to be active and post regularly. But to build personal connections, you need to join the conferences and meet the persons behind the forum avatar.
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We have some new functions for you related to the Windows standard font dialog.
For FileMaker, the new TextView.ShowFontPanel function can show the font dialog and let user change the font settings. For MacOS, the function will show the system font panel, which allows you to adjust font information asynchronously.
For Xojo, the new TextArea.WinShowFontPanelMBS function can show the font dialog for a text area. Please use NSColorPanelMBS class and NSTextViewMBS usesFontPanel property for MacOS. The panel floats and allows to change font information for current text area.
In both cases, the dialog shows with current font selection, than user can change them and the new font settings are applied to the current selection in the text.
Changes are coming to next prerelease of our FileMaker and Xojo Plugins. If you like to test today, please email us.
Due to WWDC, I'll come for a visit to California in June. As usual I like to meet other developers beside the conference and like to join local meetings for FileMaker developers in Los Angeles and San José area.
13rd June 2019 @ DIGFM
Database Interest Group for FileMaker: The user group hosted at FileMaker Inc. headquarters in Santa Clara, California. It's like a free DevCon in monthly doses. Meets 2nd Thursday of the month: 1:30pm, Meet & Greet; 2:00pm, Presentation
FileMaker, Inc (The Wedge), 5201 Patrick Henry Dr., Santa Clara CA 95054
FileMaker Developers in Southern California started in March of 1999 with a small group of FileMaker Pro developers getting together once a month to exchange development tips and ideas. Meets 2nd Friday at 9:30am
Please sign up for the groups and let them know if you like to join the meetings. Exact times may change and if you are registered, they may remind you with an email.
If you are interested in private time for consulting, training or discussion MBS or FileMaker topics, we can of course schedule a meeting. Please contact me directly if you are interested.
If you plan to sign up and get the early bird price for your ticket, please sign up soon.
Monkeybread Software is pleased to announce the European MBS Xojo Conference in metropolitan Cologne, Germany. We meet in the lovely Dorint Hotel in the center of Cologne. The hotel is in the city center and in walking distance to the main station. Beside our two conference days we have accompanying social programme with our dinner event and optional two training days. For the evenings we have casual get-together in the hotel bar or beer garden.
The schedule:
Oct 23rd: Xojo Training in English
Oct 24th: Conference, first day with dinner event
Oct 25th: Conference, second day
Oct 26th: Xojo Training in German
Registration is open. The early bird offer available till 24th April is just 499 Euro plus VAT. Attending the conference costs regularly 699 Euro plus VAT, including food and beverage in the Dorint Hotel as well as an accompanying social program.
Sessions are to be held in English. Our conference is conceived as a networking event for the Xojo community. The conference is an ideal opportunity for sharing your thoughts and your own development experience with fellow users and developers. If you like to hold a presentation, please contact us as soon as possible. Speaker receive discounted tickets.
Due to XDC, we'll come for a visit to Miami in early May. As usual I like to meet other developers beside the visited conference and like to organize a meeting for local FileMaker developers.
We got a survey to find a date: Survey ended
Please vote and let me know which date is best for most people.
If you are interested in private time for consulting, training or discussion MBS or FileMaker topics, we can of course schedule a meeting. Please contact me directly if you are interested.
As you may know we have a JSONMBS class in our MBS Xojo Util Plugin to work with JSON data. The class is optimized for best performance, but some people prefer to use native Xojo classes like dictionary for representing objects.
For the upcoming 19.2 release, we'll add new convert methods to our class. You can convert from Xojo objects to JSON and back. This involves using dictionaries for the objects and Xojo arrays for the arrays in JSON. As we don't know what is in the array, we use arrays of variants.
This function checks what is in the variant and returns a matching JSONMBS object. String, boolean, integers and doubles are just wrapped with JSONMBS objects. Dictionaries are converted to JSON objects, but we only use text for the keys. Currency values are converted to double, colors to integers, dates and texts are converted to strings before processing them. We detect arrays of String, Object, Variant, Single, Double, Int32, Int64, Boolean and Currency and convert them to JSON arrays. Anything else can raise an exception about an unsupported type.
Convert as Variant
The counter-part function on the JSONMBS class returns the varisant matching whatever is in the JSON data. The plugin will create arrays of variant, dictionaries and values (string, double, int64, boolean and nil).
You probably saw the Workspace Innovation Platform campagne from FileMaker?
Use FileMaker to escape the work rut and automate manual processes. Two things that really help here: First the Perform Script on Server script step to offload work to the server and to do things in background. Than the use of plugins to provide the toolbox to do all the things which are not built-in to FileMaker itself.
We like to show you a few example workflows and how various plugin functions can help:
1. Image upload
User takes a new picture on iPad for new product to go into the webshop
FileMaker Go puts it in a record, triggers script on server.
On server using GraphicsMagick functions, a script normalizes image orientation to 0°, image file format is converted if needed to PNG or JPEG. Colorspace may be conveyed to SRGB if needed. Borders can be automatically removed. Thumbnails are made as needed with removed metadata for images going to public (e.g. GPS removed).
CoreML functions in MBS Plugins are used with machine learning model to detect image content and assign tags automatically to image to help to find this image later by keyword.
At FileMaker conference in Tulúm, we got a feature request to see invisible characters in FileMaker calculations dialog. With next MBS Plugin 9.2, you can press Command-I in the text editor and to toggle showing invisible characters. You may see tab characters, new lines and even unprintable control characters show. This applies both to calculation dialog and custom functions dialog.
Another thing we got are tab stops. By default there are 12 and we just double this to 24 for you. So you can use tab characters to organize your bigger statements. Pressing Command-R will show the ruler if you need it, so you can see the tab stops. While you can use various options there, the formatting will not be saved in FileMaker.
You can press Command-F to search for text, press Command-G to continue search and press Command-Option-C to copy text with style.
We try to make memory leak free plugins. That is difficult and may even be impossible to do 100%. But we try our best and if you find a memory leak, please let us know.
Especially for server applications running a long time, a leak can bring down a server. If you just leak 5 KB per second on a server script, this may be over 2 GB in a week ending up in swap storage. If it's slow enough, it will fill your server's disk with swap files, but if it leaks fast, it will also hit performance a lot!
We do static analyses on our source code to find leaks. We do use C++ classes to automatically free memory when they are released, e.g. on function end. And we use NSAutoreleasePools on Mac to collect objects and release later. We try to get memory management right and automatically get there. But there may always be things not found by us.
A memory leak you report should be reproduced in a small script/method, which can be run several times. First call my do initialization steps and trigger some framework initialization, but any subsequent call should result in a higher memory usage each time. This method may have a loop to the relevant steps a 1000 times to make it a significant leak. On the end, you should have leaked a few Megabytes, so we can look for big objects not freed or thousands of small objects of the same type. Make sure you do all the release/free calls as provided by the plugin.
Due to memory management, memory is allocated in chunks. Memory is freed with delay, so you may need a short pause for memory pools to be cleared. So two or three runs may allocate the chunks
A lot of frameworks we use do leak themselves. e.g. Cocoa framework on Mac has a lot of small leaks. So in general we are not really looking for leaks which just leak a few kilobytes every few minutes. Watching a Cocoa app in Instruments we see a lot of small leaks. We prefer to fix the leaks in our code!
The FileMaker unconference in Tulúm, México started. About 45 people sitting on the stage on a mixture of seats. Looks like not everyone is here yet, maybe due to the fabulous reception yesterday in the garden?
Looking forward to meet the FileMaker developers here and get new ideas. This is much different than the mass meeting at FileMaker Inc's DevCon.
Xojo, Inc just announced the release of their new version Xojo 2019 Release 1. You can download it on the website.
It includes over 200 improvements, such as:
Significant improvements to performance of Layout Editor, especially with web projects
The free Xojo Pi license now lets you build for Console and Desktop
Improvements to URLConnection: SendSync now works with threads, added a new HTTPStatus property, URLConnection also now appears in Library for desktop projects
32-bit Windows builds use OS app manifest
Spell checking now also supported in TextArea on Linux
Dynamic Constants are now referred to as Localized Strings
General AutoComplete improvements
The complete list of improvements in Xojo 2019 Release 1 can be found in the release notes.
As usual a good mix of a few new features and lots of bug fixes. We are looking forward to XDC to see what big features they are working on.
For me an important change is the buffer size on SSLSocket, which has been increased to 256K instead of tiny 8 kilo bytes. The annoying GTK+ warnings are also gone. What is your favorite new thing?
With the new Continuity camera feature in MacOS Mojave and your iOS device, you can scan documents:
So you place the document on a table, you start the process on your Mac and than you take the iOS device to take a picture. The yellow area shows where the document is recognized, so you can scan it. iOS will do the crop and rectify steps and store the document as PDF. I needed, you can add more pages.
We'll also offer the possibility to show the popup menu with all options including selecting device for more than one of them. Screenshot is in German, but the texts are actually localized to your language.
Sunil Abraham (MBS Xojo Plugins,…): libxl ver. 3.8.5 is relea… Christian Schmitz… (MBS FileMaker Plu…): Runtime shrinker is an ol… Stephen (MBS FileMaker Plu…): A couple of things… I see… MrWatson (See invisible cha…): As ever Christian, a grea… Trisha Duke (Continuity Camera…): This is really cool. i tr… Christian Schmitz… (Send text message…): AppleScriptCode is a fiel… Tom Beattie (Send text message…): I assume the AppleScript … MrWatson (Reasons for FileM…): You can add the following… Christian (New Team Website): Tolle Truppe, weiter so!!… Markus (WWDC 2019): Congratulations! I’m real…
New in this prerelease of version 9.2 of the MBS FileMaker Plugin:
New in this prerelease of the 19.1 plugins:
If you plan to sign up and get the early bird price for your ticket, please sign up today.
These days I do last final changes for my MBS session slides. Got a nice review of the past year since last XDC to show what's new in the plugins.
We have some new functions for you related to the Windows standard font dialog.
Xojo, Inc just announced the release of their new version Xojo 2019 Release 1. You can 
